Human error. Human choices. Sigh. Farmers or not, we’ve all been there – staring down a decision we wish with everything in us we could undo. A recent video by a prominent YouTuber brought this home (again) to me. In the barn, alone and struggling, she made a choice, one I’m sure she’d love, with every cell in her body, to do over. . . That’s not farming, that’s LIFE.

Last night, up too late and with a lot on my mind as I continue to wait patiently (if you know me, you know that’s a joke) for lambs, I fell down a rabbit hole on YouTube. I keep track of a couple of different sheep farmers there, all of them with accounts in the hundreds of thousands of followers. I watch them when I’m looking for distraction, or feel like listening to an exotic accent or just want a little escapism when Alberta starts to feel too crazy. I admire some of these folks for their knowledge, I appreciate the variation in their approaches to farming and every once-in-awhile, I pick up some really good tips — particularly appreciated as my Very Busy Brain moves in to catastrophe mode (this is what happens when my VBB has been left unattended for too long).

When Life Doesn’t Go The Way It Should

Yesterday when it was coming on to midnight, I was watching the videos from one particular sheep farmer as she struggled with what looked like a very complicated, very hard lambing. The video went on and on, unsparing, uncompromising as she continued to labour over her patient. The longer it went on, the worse it got. At one point while she was editing the video, she popped on “from the future” and, amidst tears and very clear grief, urged her “sheep community” to never let things get to this point, to call the vet. “Just call,” she said. “I should have called.”

I could hear the mix of anger, frustration and grief. But even more, I could hear shame.

Pigeons, of all the emotions, surely shame is the hardest one to live with.

A Hostile Witness

Humans are faced with situations all the time that compel us to make choices — sometimes under extreme emotional strain — that, with some time and distance, we would dearly love to have back. If Mulligans were possible, can’t you think of a few scenarios where you’d snap your fingers and turn back the clock for a do-over? I can. In fact, in the wee hours of the night when my defences are at their lowest, these moments — in parenting, in friend-ing, in shepherding, in daughter-ing, in loving or living or talking — come crashing into my head and can bring me out of a dead sleep just wishing I was. . . Dead, I mean. I call them The Terrors, a kind of panic attack that comes when I’m asleep, a volcanic sweep of grief and shame and fear that erupts through the crust of my somnolent state and wipes everything sane and sound and sturdy away. There is nothing to be done but just ride the wave, to wait it out, to trust that it will pass as quickly as it surged. . . But in the moment, in the vortex, I feel as fragile as a dandelion’s fluffy parachute caught in a hurricane.

There were two videos that followed this particular ewe . . . I’m sad to say it didn’t end well. There was no “get yourself up, dust yourself off” for anyone in this. Found in her pen with her two live lambs the next morning, the ewe had died sometime in the night, despite the medical care — pain medication and antibiotics — provided. Her lambs snuffled around her body and their shepherd — responsible for bringing the lambs into this world and, she suspects, in setting up the conditions that saw their mother leave it — wept.

Accountability and The Moral Reckoning

I can’t fault the shepherd here . . . There is no point. She already knows. She’s far more experienced than I in matters sheep. She knows what went wrong and when. She knows she knows better. She knows it all. Despite the hundreds of sheep in her barn, the thousands of lambs she’s seen safely delivered, this one ewe is going to be the face that haunts her. This ewe will be the moment she wishes she had back. Because isn’t it true that none of our other routine successes ever makes up for one, tragic mistake.

In some ways, I admire her more for showing the video as it was. For laying out the unvarnished truth of her world. After all, she didn’t owe it to anyone. She absolutely could have kept this one back — in fact, if I were her friend and she had asked me, I would have told her to. Not because I think she should “only show the good parts” for fear of losing followers or as though she’d be compromising “authenticity.”

No, I would have told her to keep it for herself, not to herself. There’s a difference.

Too Close To The Bone

Sometimes, the things that happen in farming – as in life — are just too precious to share. Not precious in the “Awww! Hearts-in-their-eyes” meme sense, precious in the earned sense. The price paid is too high to share — at least, not right away. The experience you’ve been through was carved on your bones and though the wound must heal, the scar is something that stands as testament, it testifies to what’s happened. It belongs to you. You earned it and you are the one who must turn it into something redeemable.

Now for her, it may be that sharing the videos as it happened is her way of doing just that. To each their own, we’re all different and she knows her audience and her process best. I would gently venture though that there is power in allowing Time to do its work. There is power that comes with clarity, that comes with grace, that comes with understanding, that comes with resolve to do things differently, that comes with — eventually, I hope — forgiveness. And in my experience, the one thing all those things need, more than anything else, is Time.

Time Doesn’t Heal . . . But It Can Help

So for her today — and all the rest of us humans — I can only offer the small things I’ve learned. Not in shepherding or farming, but in living. It’s not much but it may be something.

Living honestly, embodying fidelity to values, doesn’t require immediacy. You don’t need to lay yourself bare, to open yourself to the kind of scorching accusations of an audience to “pay” for your error. That isn’t the price you’ll pay. The price you pay is in the wee, small hours of the morning when you sit in the black hollow of grief with no way out but through. The price you pay is the hard-eyed face glaring back at you in the bathroom mirror, your judge, jury and executioner. The price you pay is the coveralls still stained in her blood that you will wear like a hair shirt until they fall off your body. That’s the price. Not the sharing, not the public self-flagellation for all the world to see.

This thing that happened was terrible. It was avoidable. It was a choice and there is responsibility and accountability. And she knows this. I know it too. I still see faces, I still hear them, I too have a pair of coveralls stained with blood — when I couldn’t wear them anymore, I hung them in my workshop to remind me. . . so I will never make that mistake again.

I’ll make plenty of others.

Choosing Differently, One Day At A Time

And that’s the thing. She will never make that choice again. I suspect she will call much sooner for much less, in the future. That’s what happens, I find. She will, forever now, “err on the side of caution.” That face will never be too far from her mind.

I hope, with time, we will all be able to find ways to redeem the choices we’d so like to have a chance to make again. The word we wished we hadn’t said, the place we wished we hadn’t gone, the turn we wished we’d never made.

She may not get it right every time but she will change her relationship to asking for help, I’m confident of that. She will reorient herself around a profound understanding of choice/consequence and Time and repetition in this new paradigm will fundamentally change her.

Perhaps that’s the best any of us can hope for. The tear-stained face that appeared on the small screen of my phone wasn’t performing penance or grief, it was wracked across the planes and crevasses of her face. That sense of shame was coming off her in waves. There is nothing to make it better, there is no way but through. And, like every human since Adam, she has the chance to do it differently next time.

When The Terrors come for her, come for me, come for you, in the middle-of-the-night, the one thing we can all do as we cling to any kind of light in the middle of the maelstrom, is to whisper, “Yes, but the next time, I chose better.”

If you are in agriculture and need some support finding your way through —

In Canada —

National Farmer Crisis Line

1-866-327-6701 (1-866-FARMS01)
24/7, confidential, agriculture-informed crisis support for farmers, farm families, and agricultural workers across Canada. Designed specifically for agriculture.

Do More Agriculture Foundation

National ag-specific mental health advocacy, toolkits, crisis contacts, and practical resources aimed at reducing stigma in agriculture.

Canadian Agricultural Safety Association (Mental Health Hub)

Centralized mental wellness resource hub for Canadian farmers and farm workers.

In Alberta —

AgKnow Alberta Farm Mental Health Network

Alberta’s strongest farm-specific mental health referral and counselling network. Built around agricultural realities. Offers farm-informed therapy.

AgWell Alberta

Alberta-based practical farmer wellness supports, workshops, and pilot counselling programs.

Alberta Mental Health Help Line

1-877-303-2642
24/7 provincial support line (not farm-specific, but immediate).

Health Link Alberta

811
Can connect you to mental health services and crisis navigation.

In Saskatchewan —

Saskatchewan Farm Stress Line

1-800-667-4442
One of the longest-standing farm-specific mental health lines in Canada. 24/7, confidential, agriculture-informed.

SaskAgMatters / Ag Health & Safety Network

Farm-focused mental health education and wellbeing courses.

In Manitoba —

Manitoba Farm, Rural & Northern Support Services

Confidential counselling line with strong agricultural and rural familiarity.

Keystone Agricultural Producers (support resources)

Advocacy plus farm-family support pathways.

In British Columbia —

Young Agrarians Mental Health Resources

Good BC-rooted resource hub with practical support pathways and farmer-specific resources

BC Crisis Centre

Province-wide crisis support.

For many people — like farmers — who pride themselves on their ability to suck it up, plow through and “just keep swimming,” the biggest barrier isn’t access to services, it’s permission. As a support group and therapy veteran, I’m going to put this in terms my agrarian community will understand — calling before things become unbearable is not weakness. It’s maintenance, it’s no different than fixing the fence before the sheep test it.

This is a Living post, a post to share my thought processes, my experience and the philosophy that underpins our activities here at the homestead. It is not a how-to, “expert advice” or meant to reflect a wider experience than just my own, on my farm, here with my sheep.